Lindsey Delwin T, Brown Angela M
Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Mansfield, OH, USA.
J Vis. 2014 Feb 25;14(2):17. doi: 10.1167/14.2.17.
This article describes color naming by 51 American English-speaking informants. A free-naming task produced 122 monolexemic color terms, with which informants named the 330 Munsell samples from the World Color Survey. Cluster analysis consolidated those terms into a glossary of 20 named color categories: the 11 Basic Color Term (BCT) categories of Berlin and Kay (1969, p. 2) plus nine nonbasic chromatic categories. The glossed data revealed two color-naming motifs: the green-blue motif of the World Color Survey and a novel green-teal-blue motif, which featured peach, teal, lavender, and maroon as high-consensus terms. Women used more terms than men, and more women expressed the novel motif. Under a constrained-naming protocol, informants supplied BCTs for the color samples previously given nonbasic terms. Most of the glossed nonbasic terms from the free-naming task named low-consensus colors located at the BCT boundaries revealed by the constrained-naming task. This study provides evidence for continuing evolution of the color lexicon of American English, and provides insight into the processes governing this evolution.
本文描述了51位说美国英语的受访者对颜色的命名。一项自由命名任务产生了122个单语素颜色词，受访者用这些词对来自世界颜色调查的330个孟塞尔色样进行命名。聚类分析将这些词整合为一个包含20个命名颜色类别的词汇表：柏林和凯（1969年，第2页）提出的11个基本颜色术语（BCT）类别，外加9个非基本色度类别。注释后的数据揭示了两种颜色命名模式：世界颜色调查中的绿-蓝模式，以及一种新的绿-蓝绿色-蓝模式，该模式以桃红色、蓝绿色、淡紫色和栗色作为高一致性术语。女性使用的术语比男性多，并且更多女性表达了这种新模式。在一种受限命名协议下，受访者为之前被赋予非基本术语的颜色样本提供基本颜色术语。自由命名任务中大多数带注释的非基本术语所命名的是位于受限命名任务所揭示的基本颜色术语边界处的低一致性颜色。本研究为美国英语颜色词汇的持续演变提供了证据，并深入了解了支配这一演变的过程。
